Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be Quotes

“When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best?”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Am I crazy? Do I really intend, tomorrow, to charge into the teeth of the enemy, mounted on my warhorse Bucephalus, who is recognizable on sight by every man of the foe while I myself am dressed in distinctive armor, wearing a double-plumed helmet so that every warrior on the opposing side knows it’s me? Every enemy arrow is going to be aimed at me, every javelin, every lance, every sling bullet. The greatest champions of the foe will all rush straight at me, seeking to win glory by being the one to slay me. Am I out of my mind to put myself in such a position? Surely Alexander’s comrades seconded this. “Don’t risk yourself, Sire! We need you! What will the army do if you are killed?” That was reality. Objective assessment. Who could argue with it? Yet . . . Yet there existed simultaneously—and Alexander, beyond all others, was aware of it—a second reality. In this second Reality, Alexander’s seemingly reckless charge made absolute sense. Its audacity would strike terror into the hearts of the enemy.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“When you move your material ass to the geographic site of your dream, your peers and potential mentors think at once, This person is serious. She has committed. She has burned the boats. She is one of us.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“These days, of course, a branding presence is even more indispensable to an artist or entrepreneur. Can we do it? Are we intimidated? Are we too shy or introverted? Too proud? You and I can’t put half our ass where our heart wants to be. We have to be in all the way.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Alexander risked his life by being on the forefront.

Alexander wore distinctive armor. So that his rush, would be missed by no one on the field. Why did he risk his life like this?

First and most certainly, to inspire his men. They would follow their champions example. And attack with equal fire and passion.

But Alexander believed something greater. His conviction was that heaven witnessing his act of valor and fearlessness, would be compelled to act as well.

The higher dimension, would intervene, somehow, someway, in Alexander’s favor.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“There is no other time. Today is the Superbowl. Today is the day I give birth. Today is the day I die.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“When we commit fully to our calling, we acknowledge the forces of inspiration that we hope to summon to our aid.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“How did you keep going all those years without any success?” I couldn’t have answered at the time, except to say that I had no choice. Any time I tried to take the intelligent course, i.e., get a real job, I became so depressed I couldn’t stand it.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Tremendous power lies in the simple, physical act of stationing our body at the epicenter of our dream. There is magic in putting our ass where our heart wants to be.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Let me start this chapter with what may seem like an overstatement: For writers and artists, the ability to self-reinforce is more important than talent. What exactly is reinforcement? It’s when your coach or mentor tugs you aside and tells you how well you are doing, how proud of you they are, and how certain they are that ultimate success will be yours if you just stay who you are and keep doing what you’re doing. That’s reinforcement. Can you tell yourself that? Without a coach? Without a mentor? Can you be your own coach and mentor? That’s self-reinforcement.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“How do I apply Watashi’s wisdom today? If I don’t “feel” like getting out of bed in the morning, I hear and see a Little Watashi in my mind’s eye. I dismiss that “feeling” and get up. I dismiss positive feelings too, at least as they affect work. If I’m self-satisfied or in soaring good spirits and want to celebrate or take the day off, I place those feelings as well in quotation marks. I have internalized Watashi and even, in my imagination, his pool cue.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“But another lesson Watashi taught has stuck with me to this day. Watashi always pronounced the word “feel” as if it had quotation marks around it. In other words, he scorned the word absolutely. In Watashi’s lexicon, feel and feelings had no meaning in war. They had no meaning in competition. They had no meaning in life.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Often, “reality” means nothing more than conventional reality. And conventional reality is almost always wrong. Ask Dick Rowe of Decca Records, who turned down the Beatles.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Put in slightly less deathless prose, the poet’s thought might go like this: “Hey, John! This is John speaking. Those doubts you’re experiencing about Endymion? I know you think you’re never going to finish such an epic. I know you’re afraid the work will be savaged in the Times. They’ll say you’re not fit to hold Percy Shelley’s quill pen or Lord Byron’s sheet of parchment. BS, baby! I’m here to tell you, your poem is great! Scholars will be poring over its stanzas for centuries. Lovers will be cadging verses and dispatching them to their beloveds. Buck up, buddy! The tunnel may seem dark right now, but keep plugging. Don’t lose faith. You will emerge from it—I promise—to the sunlit uplands of poetic glory and renown!”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“The following is from a letter to his brother George (who was quite a character in his own right) in 1817: I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . .”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“What are you, crazy, Steve? Do you imagine anybody is gonna be interested in these lame-ass stories from your life? They are so ordinary! You are so ordinary. Readers are going to laugh you off the page. Whatever credibility you’ve built up over the years will go straight into the toilet. Stop right now before you totally humiliate yourself!”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Film director Frank Oz (who’s also the Muppet master behind Yoda and Miss Piggy) has a term for this all-in state of mind. He calls it “going the distance.” This is the test Frank applies at the start of any project—not just to himself but to anyone he will prospectively hire or collaborate with on a movie, a play, whatever. Frank asks himself, “Will this person commit unconditionally to the work? Is this someone I can count on in act 3, when the wheels come off and the faint of heart flee for the exits? Is this someone who will have my back in crunch time?” We’re talking now about the third-level meaning of “Put your ass where your heart wants to be.” Commitment over time. Commitment in the face of adversity.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Questions for ourselves: “How much do we want it?” “What sacrifices are we willing to make to see this project succeed?” “Have we ‘moved’—lock, stock, and barrel—to our inner Paris?”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“Work—day-in, day-out exertion and concentration—produces progress and order. That’s a law of the universe.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“The Sphere of Potentiality—i.e., the dimension above the Material Plane—recognizes the alteration in our hero. She has changed. She is not the same person she was, even ten seconds earlier. She has, by an act of will and love and daring, stepped out of the role of the passive and the self-paralyzed and into the role of the active protagonist, the hero. She has in fact become a hero, quaking knees notwithstanding. The universe comes to the hero’s aid.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“It is not an idle or airy-fairy proposition to declare that the universe responds to the hero or heroine who takes action and commits. It responds positively. It comes to the hero’s aid.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“the hero moves from the Ordinary World to the Extraordinary World. She has gone from the Known to the Unknown. Suddenly our hero sees herself differently. She can’t help it.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“In myth and legend, when the hero commits to an intention by taking bold action, he enacts a Cosmic Overthrow. He “crosses the threshold.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“She has proven she has guts. Does it matter that, alone at a traffic light, our passionate dreamer finds herself breaking down in tears? Does it make a difference that she’s terrified of the choice she has made, that she has to fight off nightly the overwhelming urge to pack up and go home? All that matters is that she has taken action. She is here. She has left there behind. This does not go unnoticed, by mortals or by the gods.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“From Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller: You can cut back on a lot of things as a leader, but the last thing you can ever skimp on is marketing. Your product needs a champion . . . That must be you. Marketing is your job. It can’t be passed on to someone else. Even if you’re famous, even if you have a million Twitter followers, even if you have a billion dollars to spend . . . it’s still on you and it still won’t be easy. Putting your ass where your heart wants to be means putting it out there where the world can judge it—and doing it in the smartest and most appealing way possible.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

“What fascinates me about the character of Alexander the Great is that he seemed to see the future with such clarity and such intensity as to make it virtually impossible that it would not come true—and that he would be the one to make it so.”
― Steven Pressfield, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be